As demand for data centre capacity across Africa continues to accelerate, the pressure on facility operators to expand quickly without disrupting existing operations has never been greater. Open Access Data Centres (OADC), a company within the WIOCC Group, is meeting that pressure head-on at its Parklands facility in Johannesburg, and the infrastructure backbone making it possible comes from Vertiv, a globally recognised leader in critical digital infrastructure.
The Parklands facility was originally built as a prefabricated, modular, Tier III-compliant data centre for a pan-African telecommunications provider. From the start, it was designed with phased expansion in mind. By standardising its power and cooling infrastructure around Vertiv technology, OADC has positioned the site to grow faster, handle denser workloads, and add capacity without the kind of costly redesign that typically disrupts live operations.
Why Standardisation Matters at Scale
In data centre operations, consistency is not just an engineering preference. It is a strategic advantage. When every power protection system, cooling unit, and containment solution speaks the same design language, adding new capacity becomes a repeatable process rather than a bespoke engineering project each time.
That is precisely the benefit OADC has unlocked at Parklands. The facility runs integrated Vertiv power protection, thermal management, containment systems, and energy storage, all configured to adapt as load profiles change over time. This means the site can respond to shifting customer requirements, whether that involves higher power density, new workload types, or simply more space, without starting from scratch on the infrastructure design.
For operators serving hyperscalers and AI-driven organisations, where the gap between a customer’s requirement and the deadline to meet it can be extremely narrow, this kind of deployment agility is not a nice-to-have. It is a commercial necessity.
Two Data Halls, One Consistent Architecture
The Parklands expansion has been delivered across two distinct data halls, each reflecting the same underlying infrastructure philosophy while serving different operational contexts.
The IDC 8 data hall provides a modular, scalable foundation built to handle evolving requirements while keeping operations efficient. It represents the established approach at Parklands, a model that has proven itself under real hyperscaler and AI workloads where power density and thermal efficiency are non-negotiable.
The recently commissioned IDC 10 hall extends this thinking into a traditional build format. Rather than treating the new hall as a departure from what came before, OADC and Vertiv carried the same modular architecture and product consistency into a conventional construction approach. The result is a data hall that serves a broad mix of enterprise customers while maintaining the performance and flexibility that larger cloud and AI tenants expect.
This continuity across different build types is significant. It means customers moving between colocation spaces within the facility, or scaling their footprint over time, encounter the same reliable infrastructure environment rather than navigating inconsistencies between halls.
Built for the Workloads Defining Africa’s Digital Future
The timing of this expansion reflects where African enterprise demand is heading. IDC research consistently points to accelerating data centre investment across sub-Saharan Africa, driven by cloud adoption, AI workload growth, and the increasing digital maturity of large enterprises and financial institutions across the continent.
South Africa remains the continent’s most developed data centre market, and Johannesburg sits at its centre. Facilities like Parklands are not just serving local demand. They are part of the regional infrastructure backbone that supports connectivity and compute for organisations operating across East, West, and Southern Africa.
OADC, through its parent WIOCC Group, already operates a pan-African fibre and connectivity network. Anchoring that network with Tier III-compliant, AI-ready colocation capacity in Johannesburg strengthens the group’s ability to offer end-to-end digital infrastructure solutions to enterprise and hyperscaler customers across the region.
What This Means for the Broader Market
The Parklands expansion is a useful case study in how African data centre operators can grow without sacrificing operational stability. The prefabricated, modular approach that defined the original build has proven adaptable enough to support both purpose-built AI infrastructure and flexible enterprise colocation under the same roof.
For Vertiv, the project reinforces its position as the infrastructure partner of choice for operators navigating Africa’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. For OADC, it delivers the capacity and agility to compete for the region’s most demanding cloud and AI customers. And for the broader market, it demonstrates that world-class data centre infrastructure, built to global Tier III standards and capable of supporting hyperscale workloads, is very much a present reality in sub-Saharan Africa, not a future aspiration.